Fear.

There is a line noted in my journal, dated mid-June, that I had been thinking about for weeks.

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Perhaps if adults didn't teach children to fear death, they wouldn't.

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Tonight, reading a Newsweek interview with the author, screenwriter, and director of Where the Wild Things Are, I found this quote.

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Grown-ups are afraid for children. It's not children who are afraid. (Maurice Sendak).

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Some fears are natural and healthy. The child who falls off her bike learns to steer more carefully. The boy who feels the heat of a fire tries not to fall in.

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As adults, we know that children have to learn some of these lessons on their own.

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But, out of a desire to protect them, to keep them safe, to prevent them from getting hurt, we try to circumvent parts of this process and teach them to fear certain situations. Don't touch the stove: it'll burn your hands. Move your hands, I'm going to shut the door. Don't talk to strangers. Don't get too close to wild animals. Never run with scissors. Always wait thirty minutes after eating before you go swimming. {Actually, at my grandmother's house, it was an hour, and we weren't allowed to skip lunch.}

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Generally speaking, I think teaching children to fear certain situations is a good thing. Parents and other adult caretakers should be concerned for children's well-being. Some children, of course, won't learn these lessons without experiencing them personally, but most will develop at least some sense of caution from the warnings of adults.

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It saddens me, sometimes, however, to observe how much fear we tend to instill in children. First graders who line up to use the optional hand disinfectant before lunch because they're scared to contract a sensationalised strain of influenza. Eleven year olds stressed out by standardised tests and diets. High schoolers who believe their futures to be tied to SATs and GPAs. Young adults worried that they'll choose the wrong major, college, boyfriend/girlfriend, career, and life will be doomed to failure from that point on. All of us scared to die or to watch others die.

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We try to cushion our children--and ourselves--from all forms of suffering and complication: germs, financial setbacks, accidents, broken hearts, unemployment, people who believe different things, wild animals, burns, people who look different, complicated relationships, death, and perhaps, fear itself.

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But in doing so, in so anxiously avoiding all possible encounters with pain, we don't learn how to deal with suffering when we do experience it. We become afraid of the parts of the world that we can't control, that we can't protect ourselves against, and this fear paralyses us, or at least, makes it more difficult for us to fully live.

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We spend so much time trying to avoid suffering that sometimes, we might miss the parts of life that are exactly the opposite of suffering: the wild, scary, freedom of spontaneous joy. And our cushions surely prevent us from truly experiencing life in all it's rich fullness.

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Our fears also do nothing to prepare us for the difficult circumstances that do, inherently, lurk around all of our corners. Afraid of death, we don't know how to prepare ourselves positively for it, to interact meaningfully with those on death's doorstep, or to grieve in emotionally healthy ways. Afraid of relationship tension, we never learn to fight through it alongside a friend or partner. Fearful of financial setbacks, we nevertheless buy on credit and base our self-worth on our material possessions. When tragedy or setback comes, we are often paralysed, traumatised, unable to cope and continue living.

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Indeed, for some of us, the fear of such an outcome keeps us from taking the risk in the first place.

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Surely, some of this fear is a natural part of being human. But a lot of it, I think, is more the result of our unique cultural conditioning, trained and nurtured by the society in which we live. I say this because I didn't see it nearly so much in the villagers I interacted with daily in southern Uganda.

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Not that they don't have fears. I've spoken to adults who remember fleeing in terror into the bush during the coups of decades past. Others recall the years when AIDs lurked as an unseen and incomprehensible villain. They're starting to see firsthand the results of worldwide environmental degradation. Children are learning to worry about standardised tests and future (un)employment.

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But, generally, people don't seem to live under quite the same cloud of fears that seem so normative to life here. Children are left more to experience the world as it happens, rather than taught to view it through a cautionary lens. To be honest, they probably get messier and eat more dirt, fall down more and come away with more scars... but isn't that a lot of what childhood is about anyways?

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Even, isn't that what grown up life is about too? Living and falling and loving and getting dirty and figuring things out and trying again and generally letting life happen?

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Today, won't you try setting aside some of your fears and doing some of the things you might do if you weren't afraid of them? Some of the things you always wanted to do when you were little, back before you learned to worry about the future?

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I double dog dare you to!